Monthly Archives: February 2011

I used to ride a motorbike, I believe it’s safe to now, and always took the A1 on my way to see my dad. It’s a safe Roman road unlike the obviously more glamorous and ultimately more tedious the so-called “M1”. The A1 has trucker spots on it.

I broke my leg at the crossroads where Kenneth G lived, in 1981. I was off work for four years, It wasn’t his fault, my subconscious was operating very strongly and believe it or not the Shri Yantra saved my life that night, yeah really.

I got to Rutland, and a quite severe blizzard decided to start, in June. Yeah really. I squeezed gently on my brakes and managed to avoid decking a car with the unlikely number OTO93M.

This time I came to no harm, the traffic slowed a bit and I got to Leeds safely.

Next week I met Kenneth Grant and told him of my experience. He said that it was all auspicious. Suspicious if you ask me. I have heard that the witches of Rutland can summon up all sorts of storms if they have a mind to. Usually, they don’t. But on this occasion I have the feeling they did… ♦

Outside the circles of time dwells a single indistinguishable flame, according to the tantraraajatantra.

Kenneth Grant is known for his affection for Lam – a creature from outside the circles of time that informed Aleister Crowley.

I had one of my weekly meetings with Kenneth back in the 1970s, and the subject of Lam came up.

Lam, said Kenneth was a praeternatural creature transmitting the Typhonian message in a Seti or should that be Set like manner from a far away galaxy.

I asked Frater Aossic Aiwass whether he thought Lam was outside the circles of time, like maybe Shiva, or whether he really was a creature from a galaxy far from ours.

Kenneth said that in his opinion Lam was an extraterrestial creature. I replied that it was only 100 years ago when it took you weeks to get to Sri Lanka, to Bombay or to China, like Marco Polo. I said I guessed that to Victorians the inhabitants of these places were pretty praeternatural.

I have very fond memories of Kenneth Grant – very fond memories indeed. Unlike quite a few of my friends, I never got expelled from his Typhonian OTO, I resigned and he was gracious enough to allow me to exit, gracefully. I was a member of his Sovereign Sanctuary.

It all came about because of this. I wasn’t interested in Indian traditions at all, until 1974 or so, when a vivid dream woke me up to stuff. Kenneth, actually, was very knowledgeable about tha tantrik traditions. Apart from spending a great deal of time in India in the 1950s, he also contributed many articles about Hinduism to Man, Myth and Magic.

He was very sympathetic to me when in 1978 threw up a good job to visit Mahendranath (Dadaji) in Old Mehmadabad. I had corresponded with Dadaji for well over a year – I sought tantrik initiation.

In a very sympathetic conversation I had with Aossic Aiwass, the then OHO of the Typhonian OTO, I had spelled out my vivid dream to him, and I asked him for tantrik initiation. He said he had never had tantrik initiation. Shortly after this, I got a letter from Dadaji – he had had articles published in John Spiers’ magazine Values, and John Spiers and I had exchanged adverts with each other – me in my first magazine Azoth. Dadaji asked me to send him copies of Azoth and latterly SOTHiS magazine – Jan Bailey, David Hall and myself had just started this organ.

I felt I had to go to India and seek initiation into a tradition that suddenly appeared to be in my mind and in my heart and in my body. Kenneth conferred a VII degree honorary initiation on Mahendranath, never to my knowledge rescinded.

I continue to have the utmost regard for Kenneth Grant – his knowledge was deep, practical and full of wisdom. He knew Dylan Thomas in the early 1950s – his books of poetry show that Sarasvati sat on his tongue. He told me, when he was writing his first Typhonian Trilogy, that these books were also informed by poetry. He said that it was important, after you had digested wisdom, that you published it and made it available. He said that when you died, and began to get back to the Light, you would read stuff in books and it would remind you who you were before.

Digestion, he said, involved excretion too, and these were books. If you failed to write what you had learned, or felt, it was the equivalent of mental constipation.

He was devoted to the goddess in all of her guises.

This picture is of Kenneth and me in 1978 in our flat in Golders Green, just round the corner from where he lived. I am missing him. He was a master of wisdom. I venerate his memory.♣

I am reliably informed that Kenneth Grant – born in 1924 –died two weeks back.

I have many memories of Kenneth, and will tell them, one by one, and over and over again. I have many letters from him, and will scan them in. Kenneth was a polymath, and said over and over again the power of words was the greatest thing on the planet. He tried to get me to give his letters back to him, but I was a bit of a refusenik about that – it was he who told me that when letters were sent they were the property of the receptor. What a man!

Kenneth lived in a Typhonian Tower,and a bit like the Lady of Shallott, was always looking out for strangers living in Golders Green, he lived there for a long time, with strange creatures outside the suburban semi he, Steffi and Gregori lived.

Grant was a genius in many ways, and an idiot in other ways. In his loft was a vast collection of Austin Osman Spare paintings but once he asked me to get rid of a vast collection of 1950s pornographic paintings.

My then girlfriend, Jan Bailey, a co-editor of Sothis magazine, helped me to dump Kenneth’s 1950s porn – it took five weeks – there was so much of it. It all went in several bins.

Kenneth was eloquent about sex – his books are full of it. Once, he said, he shagged a Chinese woman on a graveyard in Soho – he said her tits were so small but her thighs so big that he came all over her face, almost immediately.

He was far less forthcoming about the Ordo Templi Orientis. This was Mr Grant’s Ivory Tower. He became a refusinek if you asked him anything about it at all – I’m kind of thinking he didn’t want to think about it himself.

In short, Kenneth Grant was a very nice person and I am totalled that he is dead. I loved him.